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And Ranieri was not one to countenance acts of defiance. He insisted on respect and reasonable obedience in all things and, when he received both, he was perhaps a demanding boss, but fair. Always fair.
But what wasfairwhen it came to this woman who had been foisted upon him? The truth was, he had no earthly idea what to do with Annika.
He had spent a significant amount of money outfitting her appropriately. He’d had a number of stylists convene upon her, taking the raw materials she presented and working their magic. And he had to admit it had been worth it. Gone was her typical bedraggled look. Ranieri had been quietly pleased to find that while she would never be knocking anyone off the cover ofVogue, Bennett Schuyler’s daughter was, in fact, capable of looking reasonably put together. And that was a relief. It made it slightly less inconceivable that she had somehow captured his interest.
Yet she was still Annika.
Today she wore a dress in a shade of teal he would normally have considered loud, but it flattered her. It flattered her too much, perhaps. He hadn’t expected that. The first night he’d picked her up after the stylists had taken their liberties with her, he’d been...surprised. That was the word, surely. He’d beensurprisedto discover that beneath the careless hair, the wrinkled linens, and the voluminous cardigans she liked to drape all over herself in the colder months, Annika actually possessed a figure.
He told himself he was noticing such things for strategic purposes, nothing more.
Today, for example, he was merely noticing that the teal dress was expertly tailored to flatter her surprisingly generous breasts as well as the tiny waist he hadn’t realized she possessed. The flare of her hips below was another surprise, and one he had revisited—privately—a few too many times since she’d moved into his loft.
In his head, that was.
Her hair was twisted back this morning, not falling down this way and that. She still wore what he supposed was a version of one of her ratty cardigans, but at least this version whispered of quiet sophistication as it draped behind her like a cape.
And yet he realized that all the usual disheveled energy came directly from her. Even when, objectively speaking, he could find no specific fault with her appearance, she gave off the distinct impression that there was at least one.
Then again, perhaps the problem was that she was bearing before her a potted plant with raucously pink flowers.
Ranieri blinked, certain he was imagining that—but no.
His newly minted fiancée was indeed charging into his conference room, holding before her a large, potted plant. The pot itself appeared to be wrapped in something, a kind of foil perhaps, but it was magenta. Which matched the oversize bow wrapped around it. And yet those pinks were a different pink from that of the exuberant, round flowers.
Ranieri had never been in an actual fistfight, despite the many years he’d spent training in martial arts like Brazilian jujitsu. He had neveractuallybeen attacked. And yet this moment felt the closest he’d ever been to an all-out assault.
He did not dare look around the table at his colleagues and business associates. The strained silence in the room told him all he needed to know about their reactions. It was obvious they matched his own.
“I just wanted to take this opportunity to bring you this plant,” Annika was saying brightly. She swept to the head of the table and stopped before him, then smiled.
Fatuously, to his mind.
“Our passion cannot be contained,” she said, that smile widening, her voice almost certainly loud enough to carry down the length of the hall outside. “How I’ve longed these last years to tell the whole world what we mean to each other!”
“I am delighted,” Ranieri managed to say, without soundingentirelyas if he had glass in his mouth. “But as you can see, I’m also rather busy.”
Annika responded by thunking down the pot before him, a little too close to his laptop for his liking.
“I saw it and I knew you had to have it,” she told him, an intensity in her voice that he had never heard before. Probably because she was putting it on. This close, he could see the cool amusement in her green gaze. Then she frowned slightly as she looked around the table. “Pink flowers symbolize love, of course.”
It was a table filled with titans of industry and the sharpest business minds around, yet they all nodded as if they had come here today to immerse themselves in bloody floriography. Ranieri might have laughed, it was so absurd, except Annika swung her gaze back to him.
“I know how important your job is to you,” she said. Intensely. “And as the woman who loves you best and most, I want to support you while you toil away, making money and then making more money, ha-ha-ha.”
He stared at her in stark astonishment as she really dug into that fake laugh.
That had to be the end of it—but no. She wasn’t done.
“But of course, my sweet Ranieri Berry,” she said, and he was certain he was dreaming then. Because there was no possibility that this woman had just lapsed into baby talk in the middle of the delicate negotiation. There was no possibility that she had just called him by a pet name so saccharine and nauseating that he was not entirely certain how it was the entire conference table hadn’t lapsed into a sugar coma. He wished he had. “Of courseI miss you so much while you’re here. So I found you this wonderful dahlia that will bloom, pink and bright, like our love.”
Because, yes, there was a darker place. A lower level of horror.
“It will bloom here at the office and you’ll think of our love. You will care for it and tend to it while we are parted.” Then the ghastly woman had the gall to beam at him. “Won’t you?”
Ranieri stared at the explosion of pink before him. Then he lifted his gaze and glared around the table, daring anyone seated at it to so much as smirk in his direction.
As one, every person there dropped their gaze.
